"A viable model for thinking about some aspects of art and culture is precisely as a market in attention itself, an exchange of attentions valuable to the other. We and the artist collude in a socially institutionalized assignation to barter our respective attentions. He values our attention for many reasons, and not only because it may be associated with whatever sort of material reward the culture offers: his social identity and his sense of his own humanity are complexly involved in the transaction. We, on the other hand, attend to the deposit or representation of his attention to life and the world because we find it enjoyable or profitable, sometimes even improving. The transaction is not symmetrical: he values the attention we direct at him and his; we value the attention he directs at life and the world. He values us as representatives of a general humanity: we value him for a specialized faculty, even if perhaps articulating a general human quality. But the pattern is still that of a market, with choice on both sides and reciprocal agency."

"The Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid in An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1764) reflects on the faculty of sight, the product of an organ, consisting of a ball and socket of an inch diameter, with which we may within an instant perceive prospects (the peak of Tenerife, or St. Peter's church in Rome) it would take the sightless a lifetime to perceive by touch:

If we attend duly to the operation of our mind in the use of this faculty, we shall perceive that the visible appearance of objects is hardly ever regarded by us. It is not at all made an object of thought or reflection, but serves only as a sign to introduce to the mind something else, which may be distinctly conceived by those who never saw it.

Thus, the visible appearance of things in my room varies almost every hour, according as the day is clear or cloudy, as the sun is in the east, or south, or west, and as my eye is in one part of the room or another: but I never think of these variations, otherwise than as signs of morning, noon, or night, of a clear or cloudy sky. . . . A thousand such instances might be produced, in order to show that the visible appearance of objects are intended by nature only as signs or indications; and that the mind passes instantly to the things signified, without making the least reflection upon the sign, or even perceiving that there is any such thing. It is in a way somewhat similar that the sounds of a language, after it is become familiar, are overlooked, and we attend only to the things signified by them.

– quoted by Michael Baxandall in Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)

"Unvarying laws as ancient as the world itself make the light of one body spring back on to another body, and from this successively on to a third, and then continuously on others, like as many cascades; though always with progressive reductions in strength, from one stage of falling to another. Without the aid of these wise laws, all that is not immediately and without obstruction under the sun would be in total night. To pass from the illuminated side of objects to the side the sun does not reach would be like passing beyond the surface of the earth into the interior of caves and caverns. But, by an operation of the powerful springiness that God puts into every portion of this nimble substance, light, it pushes against every body upon which it arrives and is pushed back again, as much by its own bounce as by the resistance it meets."

– Privé Formey, writing on the topic SHADOW in the Encylcopédie (completed in 1765), as quoted in translation by Michael Baxandall in Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)

COMRADES OF TIME

"Hesitation with regard to the modern projects mainly has to do with a growing disbelief in their promises. Classical modernity believed in the ability of the future to realize the promises of past and present – even after the death of God, even after the loss of faith in the immortality of the soul. The notion of a permanent art collection says it all: archive, library and museum promised secular permanency, a material infinitude that substituted for the religious promise of resurrection and eternal life. During the period of modernity, the 'body of work' replaced the soul as the potentially immortal part of the Self. . . . But today, this promise of an infinite future holding the results of our work has lost its plausibility. Museums have become the sites of temporary exhibitions rather than spaces for permanent collections. The future is ever newly planned – the permanent change of cultural trends and fashions makes any promise of a stable future for an artwork or a political project improbable."

– Borys Groys, Comrades of Time, 2009

"I study only what I like; I occupy my mind only with the ideas that interest me. They may or may not prove useful, either to me or to others. Time either will or it will not bring about the circumstances that will lead me to a profitable employment of my acquisitions. In any case I will have had the inestimable advantage of not having been at odds with myself, and of having obeyed the promptings of my own mind and character."

– from Products of the Perfected Civilization: selected writings of Chamfort, edited and translated by W.S. Merwin (1969)